03 September 2013

Ten Years With Skype

Skype went live ten years ago, on 29 August 2003, and less than two years after that I became the Product Manager for Skype Toolbars. I gave Skype more than five years, and I still have a keen interest for Skype. Congratulations to all my former colleagues and partners!

Outlook Skype
I early saw the possibilities Skype gave, and my first plan was to develop kalmstrom.com products for Skype. In 2004 I could publish Outlook Skype, that connected Outlook and Skype. It soon became a success and led to an offer from Skype that I could not resist.

Skype Toolbars
In June 2005 I begun working full time as Product Manager for Skype toolbars. By then I had arranged it so that the kalmstrom.com products were taken well care of and my company could continue to grow even though my own contributions were not as extensive as before.

As Product Manager I was responsible for several enhancements of Skype. First of all the integration in Outlook add-on, of course, which was acquired by Skype. I also integrated Skype in the Microsoft Office suite and in Facebook.

Web integrationAn interesting development task during my time at Skype was the website integration. If you have seen phone numbers on web pages turn into clickable buttons you know what I mean. It required a lot of research and tweaking before this click to call feature was finally released in 2007.

Great years
My years with Skype were fascinating and I met a lot of interesting and enthusiastic people. Still, I wanted to invest more time in my own products, so in October 2010 I left my employment at Skype. However, that did not mean that I stopped using Skype!

Folder HelpDesk integrationWhen we released version 13 of the kalmstrom.com incident management tool for Outlook, it had a new feature that was also connected to Skype: a possibility to call from inside the incident ticket. This feature may be used with any desktop calling application, but I think it will most often be Skype.